Build Advice £1000ish new build, with lots of questions

Cheers again noizdaemon, I'll just leave it then as the price increase is pretty steep.

I've not really thought about mATX just because one day I might need some of those extra slots for a HD tuner (when they fall a LOT in price) and who knows what else.

Sound card wise, hadn't spent too long researching them. Just read somewhere that the DG was very good for its price with fewer driver issues than the Creative cards, is that right? any other recommendations? Haven't got an incredible set of speakers to really use justify spending that much on a sound card, so perhaps I'll just hold off for a while till I can afford both.

Wasn't really planning on upgrading for at least 4 or 5 years so not too bothered about PCI going obsolete for now anyway.

If I took the soundcard out, any other parts anyone would upgrade? Limits maybe 950 ish.

 

I'd always go for full ATX over mATX if you can purely for the added expansion slots, but that's just me.

The DG is a decent little card and as you quite rightly said, the drivers are better than Creative ones. Unless you're an audiophile, I don't see the point in spending more on a sound card, your speaker quality will be the limiting factor I reckon.

Only thing I'd change would be PSU, I'g for the HX650 over the TX650. Basically the same PSU except the HX is modular, so makes cable routing easier.

 

Yeah it is only a tenner more I suppose.

One more question (for now,) am I going to regret only having two optical bays? What do people use them for? Just fan controllers and drives?

Just noticed the motherboard doesn't have an internal usb3.0 header which I would like. What else is a good option?

 

How does the gigabyte z68xp-ud3 gen3 look?

 

For the extra £20 I'd go for it. It supports CrossFire and SLI for starters

 

Hmm should I take that into account and get a better Psu... Hmm

Thanks for all the advice everyone.

 

It's got other added features as well (all of which elude me at the moment ), I mentioned the SLI support only because it's the first thing I look at on a motherboard.

If you do plan on ever going for two graphics cards the HX750 would be the next logical choice (or the 850). But I'd probably get the 650 and see how it goes. You can always sell it later on and buy a higher wattage at a later date.

 

Yeah I think I'll just do that. Cheers again!

 

Down18 these guys gave me advice when I joined last September. i took thier advice and got myself an awesome rig. Though I picked up a P8P67 which suited my needs at the time and wish I'd gone Z68 for SLI support. But oh well I can always change that at a later date.

Great advice and good folks to talk too. I devote more time to Bit Tech than any other webiste. other than Twitter and being on BF3

The reason I am saying this is by sticking around you meet some awesome people. Though after this don't check out the Hardware section too much else you will want to spend even more money.

Been fighting the upgrade itch since December.

 

Hah I'm planning on disappearing as soon as I've bought my rig for that sole reason, my initial plans back in November were a rig with a **** case without usb3.0 (because who cares about a case and I don't have any USB3.0 devices yet), a non modular psu because I wasn't going to look inside ever, a 5 quid membrane keyboard, no separate cooler because what's the point in overclocking, less ram, a cheaper cpu, etc etc etc

now my budget has pretty much doubled just because I've been reading so much about other people's awesome rigs! Next purchase - mechanical keyboard when CM Quickfires come out here I think hah. And then maybe a monitor. and then maybe a Noctua D14 and some better fans. etc